1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a production/manufacturing planning system. More specifically, the invention relates to a production/manufacturing planning system for use in a factory, such as a semiconductor manufacturing factory, which has a plurality of manufacturing lines, each of which has a plurality of processes.
2. Description of the Background Art
The features of a conventional production/manufacturing planning system are known as follows. That is, conventional production planning for the whole factory having a plurality of manufacturing lines (the planning for the input/delivery quantities into/from a plurality of manufacturing lines) is usually made on the basis of past records, e.g., a mean term of works, a mean operation rate, a mean number of lots processed per equipment, and a mean number of lots batch-processed per equipment. This is the same in the case of commercially available software tools, such as Pacemaker and Rhythm.
However, as shown in FIG. 13, in the case of such a conventional method for predicting the future on the basis of past records, if a future product mix or the like is changed, planning is upset. Therefore, in order to predict the future, predicting the future change in product mix, at least to some extent is required.
In addition, conventional production planning for the whole factory is calculated with deteriorated precision in view of the processing capacity of the system. This is because the amount of data concerning all of the plurality of manufacturing lines (a wide range), all of the products in different processes including pretreatment and after-treatment processes (multiple products amounting to thousands of kinds), and the need for long term planning extending over periods of from three months to six months (a long term range) is enormous and exceeds the processing capacity of the system. For this reason, only data concerning xe2x80x9cnumerical quantitiesxe2x80x9d serving as final numerical values, such as scheduled quantities of input and delivery into/from each of the manufacturing lines, is normally outputted as future prediction data. However, when progress management is carried out for every product (every lot) in all of the manufacturing lines, the xe2x80x9cnumerical quantitiesxe2x80x9d serving as numerical values do not have sufficient precision, so that the precision of production planning suffers.
Moreover, other factors upsetting conventional planning include external disturbances, such as a variation in quantity of production (requests for an increase and decrease, etc.), and internal disturbances inside of the manufacturing lines, such as the equipment being down, variation in yield, and an abnormality in the associated process. Even if an alarm is given when internal disturbances on the inside of the manufacturing lines occur, it is not always true that such an alarm is needed. That is, it is not always the case that when equipment goes down that there is a decrease in quantity of production. For that reason, conventional production planning cannot cope with internal disturbances such as equipment going down. Thus, conventional planning does not treat internal disturbances in the manufacturing lines adequately when performing production planning for the whole factory.
As can be seen from the foregoing, it is not possible to sufficiently precisely perform conventional production planning and manufacturing planning since the function of performing production planning for the whole factory has been separated from the function of performing manufacturing planning for each of manufacturing lines. In addition, when internal disturbances and/or external disturbances occur in the manufacturing lines, conventional planning cannot determine whether these disturbances have a bad interference on production planning for the whole factory.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to eliminate the aforementioned problems and to provide a production/manufacturing planning system capable of performing production planning for the whole factory and of performing manufacturing planning for each manufacturing line to sufficiently precisely perform production planning and manufacturing planning.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a production/manufacturing planning system capable of easily grasping whether internal and/or external manufacturing line disturbances will have a bad influence on production planning for the whole factory.
In order to accomplish the aforementioned and other objects, according to one aspect of the present invention, a production/manufacturing planning system comprises: a production planner for performing production planning for the whole factory and outputting a planning result; and a manufacturing scheduler for providing individual manufacturing line planning schedules for each kind of product being produced by each of the manufacturing lines on the basis of the planning result outputted from the production planner.
According to another aspect of the present invention, a production/manufacturing planning system comprises: a production planner for performing production planning for the whole factory on the basis of information concerning a process capability indicative of a manufacturing capacity of each of the manufacturing lines, and outputting a planning result; a manufacturing scheduler for making a manufacturing planning schedule for each of the kinds of products produced by each of the manufacturing lines on the basis of the planning result outputted from the production planner; a line capability grasping simulator for simulating a delivery quantity being a quantity of products produced by each of the manufacturing lines, to provide simulated result data for predicting a future delivery quantity of each of the products, and to provide information concerning the process capability indicative of the manufacturing capacity of each of the manufacturing lines; a process control system for controlling the progress of a plurality of processes in each of the manufacturing lines, to provide historical information data, which is, for each manufacturing line, past record data for each of the products produced by that manufacturing line; and a scheduled past record control system for determining whether it is likely that a shortage of a delivery quantity with respect to the manufacturing planning schedule will occur in the future, using the historical information data of the process control system and the simulated result data of the line capability grasping simulator.